Tech vs. Media: Which TV Streaming Strategy Is Better?

The merits of ‘bingeable’ and weekly release schedules for TV shows

Photo: Pinho/Unsplash

Last weekend at Disney’s D23 Expo, the company confirmed that its forthcoming Disney Plus streaming service will release episodes of original series on a weekly schedule, “ditching” the binge-watching model of Netflix, as some put it.

Rich Greenfield, a veteran media analyst, noted that the release strategy of current and forthcoming streaming platforms seems to be split squarely across “tech platforms” following bingeable schedules and “legacy media” companies releasing episodes of their original content on a week-to-week basis, as they traditionally had.

Greenfield and others on Twitter positioned this divergence of strategies as “consumer first vs. business model first.” They posited that releasing every episode of a TV season at the same time, allowing viewers to watch them on their own schedule, is a better consumer experience, while a weekly release schedule, which requires viewers to sustain their subscriptions to watch the same show over months, is a better corporate business model.

This framing was undoubtedly informed by Netflix’s early posturing of releasing entire seasons at once as more satisfactory for consumers compared to the “managed dissatisfaction” of traditional TV seasons. Back in 2013, chief content officer Ted Sarandos commented in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

During another interview three years later, Sarandos doubled-down on the superiority of bingeable TV seasons:

“…there’s no reason to release it weekly. The move away from appointment television is enormous. So why are you going to drag people back to something they’re abandoning in huge numbers?”